Book Worm

If you are familiar with the terms ‘value investing’ and ‘behavioural biases’ then chances are that you have heard about ‘checklists’ too. The idea of checklist has been made popular in recent times by Dr. Atul Gawande.

A surgeon by profession, Dr. Gawande is also a prolific writer and deep thinker. He is a staff writer at ‘The New Yorker’. Charlie Munger was so impressed with one of his article that he mailed him a $20,000 cheque as a thank you.

[Update: Dr. Gawande was recently appointed as the CEO of a healthcare venture formed by Amazon, J.P. Morgan and Berkshire Hathaway.]

[Read more…] about The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande

Great perspectives on investing from the wonderful investor and multidisciplinary thinker, Mohnish Pabrai.

I am sure the author of this book needs no introduction, but for the benefit of people who don’t know much about him, I am going to start with an interesting trivia. How much would you pay to have lunch with Warren Buffett? How about Rs 4 crore?

Don’t be surprised because that’s the amount Mohnish Pabrai (along with his friend Guy Spier) paid to have a private lunch with Warren Buffett in 2006.

Mohnish manages US$ 850+ million US based fund called Pabrai Funds and is a hardcore Buffett disciple. He has written another popular book called The Dhandho Investor.. However, the book I am talking about here is a rare one.

Mohnish has built 3 successful businesses in the last 25 years, including a technology company, a Buffett style hedge fund and a very successful philanthropic organization called Dakshana Foundation, which educates talented underprivileged children to qualify for IITs. With this kind of experience, I am sure he has some interesting insights for us.

In the previous issue of VIA, we had shared the link to Dakshana’s annual report. If you haven’t read it yet, I would suggest please don’t miss it.
[Read more…] about BookWorm: Mosaic: Perspectives on Investing

“Latticework”, written by Robert Hagstrom, is unlike most other investment books I have ever read. I won’t advise you to read this book if all you are looking for is magic formulas or readymade rules of sound investing.

This is a powerful book arguing for the importance of a multidisciplinary approach to investing. So if you are one amongst the many investors who have been searching out companies to invest in for a number of years and all you have learned is to plug basic financial information into excel models, this book may be worth a read.

[Read more…] about BookWorm: Latticework